Weeknote S2E5: real life jargon

In which digital jargon and slogans come to life

In S2E3, I paid homage to a classic GDS poster. This week, a few other familiar phrases of digital jargon leapt out into real life.

Transformation should be end-to-end

Digital, Data and Technology are one profession, and the government service standard is pretty clear:

Digital Service Standard (pre-July 2019)

It’s one thing to read blogposts and hear the phrase ‘end-to-end’ from digital colleagues, another thing to remember its importance in the day-to-day. This week and last, my team was doing a major update to the data that underpins a service we run. We spent absolutely ages checking and double-checking the data itself, running as many quality-assurance steps as we could imagine. We were super-cautious in transferring the updated data, going via a sandbox to ensure we’d protect the live service. We then did more QA, of the data itself. Then, because the service pulls data automatically, I gave the green light, sat back, passed go, collected £200, and was all like

We didn’t test how the new data would appear in the front end of the service. The indefatigable Sam dropped us a note to say that there was some funny business happening with how things looked in the service. Cue some frantic fixes. Not a major error, relatively easily resolved, with three lessons learnt:

• assumptions (such as ‘it’ll look fine in the final service’) are risks;
• test the end-to-end service, from data and technology to the service itself; and
• I am surrounded by fantastic people who pick up on such things and address them rapidly, so if I fail to spot something, the team will prevail

Not all superheroes wear capes. These ones do

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Transformation means bringing people with you

But-one-get-one-free: changing how a team uses data and technology can be difficult. It sometimes means recognising that current practices are not fit for purpose, and always means recognising that new ways of working aren’t easy to adopt. This week I was really pleased with how open and positive my colleagues are to change, as we took small steps towards improving how they use data and technology. I also saw, certainly not for the first time, the power of showing digital tools in action — so much more powerful than talking about them, and part of making new systems less scary and more user-friendly. My team gets the importance of going on the journey towards data-driven decision-making together — which makes my life infinitely easier.

Data [science] is a team sport

This was my favourite insight from the time I spent with in the GDS data science team, who wrote about the multidisciplinary, collaborative nature of our work.

Data science is a team sport

Although my team isn’t doing data science per se yet, we are using data and insight to inform decision-making and striving to lay the groundwork for reliable, reproducible analytics in the future. In making progress on data this week, we drew directly or indirectly on the expertise of:

• users of data and insights derived from it, current and future
• owners of data, and owners of business problems — not always the same people as each other, or as the point above
• user researchers, delivery managers, service owners
• technologists

I’m not entirely new to government digital, nor am I the oldest hand. It’s useful to reflect every so often on these slogans, phrases and jargon that pervade our world, and note when they crop up in real life. I wonder how soon we’ll be able to say that we’re solving whole problems for users.